U.S. localization drives MapleStory’s renaissance 20 years after release

The online game MapleStory may be 20 years old, but it’s experiencing its second heyday in 2025.
 
The platformer was ranked as the second-most played game in Korean internet cafes in June, and the game is doing better than ever in North America, expanding its player base year on year.
 
But MapleStory is not the same game in Korea and North America; far from it. While they start on the same fundamentals, the two servers adopted different approaches to in-game content and, most importantly, their business models.
 
“Korean gamers tend to team up to figure out the defninitve way on how to play the game, and they follow that answer; North American users, on the other hand, tend to play games each in their own ways,” Nexon America Chief Product Officer Oh Han-byeol — the man behind the Global MapleStory Service (GMS) — said in a written interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily, explaining why the North American version of the game had to change from the original Korean one.
 
 
“It doesn’t matter whether their ways are inefficient; what matters is that the players are having fun while doing so,” he said.
 

Nexon America Chief Product Officer Oh Han-byeol poses in front of the Nexon America headquarters in Segundo, California. [NEXON]

 
Oh, also known by his in-game name Inkwell, joined Nexon in 2005 and became the fourth MapleStory director in Korea in 2010. He moved to Nexon America in 2015 and led the development of the 2023 first-person shooter game The Finals, before becoming the Chief Product Officer of Nexon America, who is also in charge of the GMS.
 
MapleStory — first released in Korea in 2003, followed by a 2005 release in North America — is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) featuring users embarking on an adventure in a fantasy world. The game had over 250 million registered users as of 2023, and it was ranked as the 40th highest-grossing video game franchise in 2020 according to Titlemax, having an accumulated gross of $3 billion.
 
“Korean gamers tend to value efficiency in gaming, they ‘invest’ items and money, and they value the usefulness and return-on-investment,” Oh said, “But North American and global users value their autonomy in gaming and their varied playstyles.”
 
He added, “Understanding and reflecting such differences are extremely important in running the global service.”
 
This is why the North American MapleStory operates a second server, known as the Heroic world, with entirely different game mechanics. While the Korean version of the game and the conventional servers of GMS rely heavily on users buying and selling items from each other, the Heroic world banned user transactions and encouraged users to acquire and enchant their own items. The Korean MapleStory also received the same update, but was removed after backlash from existing users calling it unfair treatment.
 
“We saw how the same content that was loved by Korean gamers didn’t get the same reception in North America and other parts of the world as time went on,” Oh said. “We had to come up with a new kind of localization strategy — one that does more than just translation, but customized content development and management for the different regions.”
 

Nexon America Chief Product Officer Oh Han-byeol poses in front of the Nexon America headquarters in Segundo, California. [NEXON]

 
For instance, when the Korean MapleStory decided to shut down its Heroic world — then known as Reboot world — Oh vowed to keep the Heroic world in global MapleStory and ensured users that GMS would not copy the footsteps of the Korean counterpart.
 
“And yes, because we have exclusive content like this, the fundamentals are different with Korean MapleStory, and it introduced complexity in version updates and increases the difficulty of maintaining it separately,” Oh said. “But to maintain GMS’s unique game direction and considering the longevity of the game, we thought it was worth the effort.”
 
There are now dedicated developers in Korea and the United States in charge of maintaining and updating GMS, and Nexon is increasing the number of such developers, according to Oh.
 
While Nexon didn’t provide the user count of its North American servers, it said its users have been increasing in the last few years.
 
And as the North American MapleStory celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, Oh said MapleStory is far from phasing out — they are merely at the stage of implementing the changes that they’ve been preparing for a while, which involved him convincing the Korean executives.
 
One of the new major content areas that Oh and his team are preparing is MapleStory Classic World. While not much has been revealed as of press time, the project is designed to appeal to newer users, featuring a “simpler and more straightforward structure” to lower the entrance barrier to MapleStory. The project will be officially unveiled at MapleCon in Los Angeles in October.
 
“I want MapleStory to be remembered as a game where you can come back to play anytime and it will still feel familiar yet welcoming, a game that will remain as a good memory for a long time,” Oh said. “I want the game to be a companion game that is loved by gamers all around the world, and I’ll work hard to make that happen.” 
 

BY CHO YONG-JUN [[email protected]]